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On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

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Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#541

Post by quietbritishjim »

dahfizz wrote: post #459
whack wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone. I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy" A few factors to consider: - You had an aunt you could live with - As a yo…

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy". From their description, it doesn't sound like living with his Aunt was a tremendous boon either. I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I jus…

I think the ones you are thinking of are those that specifically called out as being made as a child or only just out of childhood. Yes people who work hard in school or university should be rewarded (both in principle and because, as a practical matter, they make a financially greater contribution to society). But the converse to that doesn't fully hold: people that make bad decisions as a child should still be given a chance to redeem themselves, somehow, later in life.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#542

Post by u678u »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #450
u678u wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the kind of thing that casts a shadow over your whole life. Shadow really though? I'm super glad everything came through my own work, I'd hate if my parents gave me anything. I hate spending any money, to me that is just sensible though not a problem.

I’m also very pleased with the results I seem to have wrought myself (with help of course), but I always notice that I’m a bit behind the curve compared to people getting ahead in the workforce, adulting with home refinancing or retirement, entering Ivy league direct from high school, or in high school, the students that seemed to know which classes to take, or what AP was (I took 3 while my peers averaged 6-7 AP cou…

Yeah I could never afford to do a Masters or PhD where those people now seem to be doing extra well.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#543

Post by offtop5 »

buescher wrote: post #405
offtop5 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas and insurance alone can easily hit 300 of you drive enough. Say you keep it at 200, 100$ a month to fix minor things isn't unreasonable. But that assumes you bought a car cash, from my experience people tend to finance cars just because they can't get three or four thousand dollars together at one time. Then you're paying $400 a month

Middle class perspective: if you can buy a car for cash, but you can get a good interest rate on a loan, you may be better off taking the loan. The opportunity cost of having cash sunk into the car can be greater than your financing costs.

The problem is most people buy more car than they can afford when they finance it. If I have to save $10,000, and I have it in my mind that I don't buy things on credit, I'm only going to buy a $10,000 car. But if I have $1,000 for a down payment and the car dealership talks me into a $30,000 car with zero down, I might take that deal.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#544

Post by pmiller2 »

birdyrooster wrote: post #484
sologoub wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has experienced pretty rough times (different from the OP), but doing just fine myself, of course luck has a lot to do with it, but why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same? I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people e…

He said poverty doesn’t have a color implying that black people aren’t impoverished because of systemic racism, but because they don’t work hard enough. It’s racist drivel.

Keep in mind, you're referring to a comment on a message board that took maybe 30 minutes to write, and likely less, not an op-ed in the NYT. Read more charitably, and in context, "poverty doesn't have a color" sounds more like "people of any race can end up poor."

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#545

Post by throwaway0a5e »

swiley wrote: post #342
cwp wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway. Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US…

This is what's ridiculous about much of the zoning and building codes here. People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

All sorts of things are like this.

The older I get the more I realize that you can't regulate the things wealthy societies do into existence. If everyone can't afford building code things collapse when you mandate that. If the economy is underpinned by bad working conditions or child labor things collapse when you regulate them. If people can't afford to eat at restaurants that follow some new code then they simply won't and those restaurants will fold. If you restrict the supply of some trade through licensing in the name of quality then you just get amateurs doing the lower dollar work for cash. A society has to be able to afford to do the things it mandates. People have to get wealthy enough to reliably afford "right" before you can legislate away "wrong".

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#546

Post by chmod600 »

whack wrote: post #377
throwaway-0987 wrote: post #174

Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone. I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy" A few factors to consider: - You had an aunt you could live with - As a yo…

When wearing your policymaking hat, I agree that you should consider what people actually do (which is not always wise) rather than just what they should do.

But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.

You are obvioualy wearing your policymaking hat. Unfortunately, policymaking is and endless mess of arguing and distracts real people from doing the right thing. Calling things "unfair", even if true, is discouraging for struggling people and makes them less likely to succeed if they listen to you.

The fact is that there's a lot of opportunity here, and a lot of people in the world realize that and come here to realize the opportunity.

Any message of unfairness, in my opinion, should be coupled with the context that the best way forward is still by prudent choices and a multi-generational outlook. Like so many immigrants have.

You call poverty a "trap", but part of that is imposed by a given location. That coal mining town might never come back, and opportunities will be scarce. But growing cities will always offer opportunity to newcomers. It's much easier to "immigrate" from a declining city/town to a growing one than from another country.

This is not to say that we can't improve policy. We can. But the constant drumbeat of unfairness and victimhood is a counterproductive tactic in the policymaking process.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#547

Post by asoneth »

whack wrote: post #377
throwaway-0987 wrote: post #174

Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone. I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy" A few factors to consider: - You had an aunt you could live with - As a yo…

In my experience, an individual who believes that success is the result of hard work will end up being more successful than a similar individual who believes that success is primarily due to starting conditions or luck.

At the same time, government policies that acknowledge that success is hugely dependent on starting conditions and luck seem to result in more equitable societies. (i.e. higher Gini coefficient or Shorrocks index)

I don’t think there's an inherent conflict between those perspectives -- it's boiling them down to two-dimensional strawman arguments that makes them look that way.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#548

Post by nemothekid »

dahfizz wrote: post #459
whack wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone. I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy" A few factors to consider: - You had an aunt you could live with - As a yo…

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy". From their description, it doesn't sound like living with his Aunt was a tremendous boon either. I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I jus…

>"OP made good decisions and worked hard"

On a national or even global scale I try to avoid generalizations like this because trivially they don't lead to good policy outcomes. It's almost a little like stock picking. If 5/100 hedge funds make a positive return over the year, my first thought isn't "the other 95 refused to work to better themselves".

It's easy to understand this with hedge funds, but people commonly make this mistake when talking about human beings. You wouldn't be taken seriously if you said those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard". I feel most people are the same way - I don't think any rational actor refuses to better themselves, rather it is a fallacy we tell ourselves to explain why things the way they are. I've seen plenty of "hard working" people relegated to poverty because their kid got sick.

Finally, the best solution is not to focus on individual funds, but on the index. Providing a better baseline for all companies leads to a better overall index and having a strong economy involves having a section of it the "wastes" a lot of money investing in the in the future.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#549

Post by pwg »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #408
technofiend wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go read The Millionaire Next Door. You'll see that there are plenty of people like yourself who remain frugal after managing to pull themselves out of poverty. I'm suggesting the book to both validate your behavior but also give you some examples so you can perhaps moderate it if you still feel that's needed. I can give a single example from my life: my uncle managed to snag a liquor distributorship after WW II. It w…

I really didn't like that book, for me it missed the point entirely. For the entire length it discusses how you accumulate more wealth by not spending it, but it never discussed why you would be accumulating all that wealth. People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords. This book just assumes the end goal is the number on a bank account.

> but it never discussed why you would be accumulating all that wealth.

One reason is that if one accumulates that wealth, and puts that wealth to work itself making money (i.e., investing it) then one obtains an income stream that is separate and apart from the number of hours per day one can spend "working".

Accumulate enough money that is itself making money, and one can live comfortably without having to spend 40+hrs/week "working" for one's income.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#550

Post by xxpor »

criticaljudge wrote: post #512
whimsicalism wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves. I think everyone is deserving of not living in poverty. Even "lazy" people.

I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

> Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.

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