On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by ctdonath » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #515

dahfizz wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of "deserving", I would agree. Certainly, everyone should have the tools and opportunities they need to build the life they want. Society has limited resources. Until we manage the post-scarcity utopia, I would prefer my tax dollars go to someone who will use them to build a better life.

This is a lie. The world has enough resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone. We've chose to build a system that does not. Perhaps you find that defensible, perhaps you find that appalling, but argue that position, not one that isn't true.

We only have that much because of the incentive to produce. Redistribute, by compulsion, the fruits of one’s labors and most will soon stop laboring. I may be able to support >10, but compel me to and my productivity will plummet.

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

#602

Post by jasonlotito » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

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…

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to being able to make the right decision because of outside factors. In this case, the aunt. Without that single person, I imagine things might have been different.

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

3 of those 5 factors began with "As a youth..."

The government can and should help the youth lift themselves out of poverty regardless of the situations of their parents or other situations. They lack many rights that adults have, and in exchange for that, they deserve better support then demanding children should simply "work to better themselves."

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

#603

Post by lostcolony » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #548

dahfizz wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for this analogy.

Because...yes. So much yes. Even had this person engaged in crime ('to feed his family!'), but still come out of it on top, we'd be saying "see? Even with those slip ups, he did the right thing most of the time and came out on top", but then we turn around and three strikes, lock someone else up for decades. And we don't know the people who failed, despite doing everything 'right', who died homeless and malnourished.

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

#604

Post by keyboardCowBoy » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #497

burlesona wrote: post #167

This is a great write-up, and as someone who spent time being poor-ish, it really resonated. What I realized from my own life experience: the US sawed the bottom rungs off the ladder in the 1950s when it suburbanized. There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area, and virtually every societal problem we deal with either stems from this or is made worse by it. Then the healthc…

>There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area This just isn't true. The majority of the US has cheap housing. The person who wrote the article lives in Pheonix where you can get houses for 200k or under. Like this perfectly good 3 bed 2 br for 200k: https://www.redfin.com/AZ/Phoenix/8520-W-Palm-Ln-85037/unit-... Housing costs are out of control in a handful of places in the…

I signed up just to respond to you because I live in Phoenix and there is no affordable housing here in a desirable neighborhood. There are no single family homes under 200K in Phoenix. A decent started sized home will cost you almost 300K and good luck finding one. That example you gave is a home that is in an area you wouldn't want to send your kids to the schools, walk around at night, and crime has been rampant in Maryvale since the 1990s and has been getting worse. There is a reason its priced like that. On a side note the home's yard is very small and is near Desert SkyMall which has had multiple shooting and deaths over the last few years. Just google desert sky mall shootings.

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

#605

Post by a1369209993 » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

phunster wrote: post #370

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…

"Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know." -Why don't you want your co-workers to find out? "I made it and you can too" - That's just either ignorance or really wishful thinking.

> That's just either ignorance or really wishful thinking.

Or misleading (as a possibly good-faith mistake) use of the word "can", that would be better phrased as "I made it and you might too".

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

#606

Post by buescher » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

offtop5 wrote: post #543

buescher wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but a complementary problem is that your $10000 used car is probably overpriced, driven up by the demand for lower-cost-up-front cars. Edmunds' 5-year TCO on a 2015 Corolla is only about $20/month less than that of a 2021 Corolla. There have been years where their estimate was for slightly higher TCO on the five-year-old car.

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

#607

Post by EvilEy3 » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #439

beaner wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it came down to hundreds of decisions along the way, not just one or two, that isn't luck. She's a good decision maker.

Bad decisions can have good outcomes. People are notoriously bad at predicting the future, so really it depends on how often you get lucky. I think charisma has the greatest effect on this.

I would argue if bad decision leads to better outcome then it is a good decision.

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

#608

Post by criticaljudge » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #528

criticaljudge wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living suppor…

I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general.

Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.

Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?

I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.

Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).

In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.

Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".

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

#609

Post by wizzwizz4 » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #327

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By “negative value“ I mean “the world would be better off if nobody did that”, not “negative relative to the counterfactual where you didn't do it”. The latter is good for individual decision-making, but it isn't very good for accurately compensating value contributed… unless we have some variety of UBI, but regardless, that's no longer capitalism; it's an inverse job auction. > Also, if you consider class action law…

>The latter is good for individual decision-making, but it isn't very good for accurately compensating value contributed Why not? How could an economy function if it were based on real value as opposed to relative value? Farmers and water treatment engineers would all be billionaires and everyone would waste a lot of resources trying to become farmers and learning about water treatment. If you drive a truck of medica…

> and everyone would waste a lot of resources trying to become farmers

• There's only so much arable land, so people couldn't do this.

⋄ Thus, people who wanted to become farmers but didn't have land would either give up, or innovate things like hydroponics.

• There's only so much food people need to eat. Producing more than that isn't contributing value; in this case, markets approximate that reasonably well (though with other problems, so many governments subsidise food production in some way).

• People already waste a lot of resources trying to become tax-reduction lawyers or middle managers¹ or gain other high-paid, useless jobs.

> If you drive a truck of medical supplies, you'd make millions, but if you drive a truck of consumer goods, you'd make very little, despite doing the same work.

Good point! This hypothetical system that hasn't had hundreds of years to work out the kinks has some potential issues. I wouldn't say it's worth dismissing it out of hand because of that, though; they don't seem like fundamental problems. For instance, the current system already distinguishes between rapid medical transportation networks (e.g. organ motorcyclists) and regular ol' freight.

Before trying to solve these problems, we should work out how the (magical, instant, “everyone just decides to start doing it”) introduction of such a system would change society. It's entirely possible that it would change enough to eliminate this problem, and introduce others in its place.

---

¹: Middle management isn't inherently useless – there can be useful hierarchies involving middle management, I'm sure. In my personal experience, I haven't encountered any, and popular culture agrees with me so it's decent shorthand, but if your job title is “middle management” and you have a genuinely useful job, this isn't a dig at you. (Tax lawyers, though… offence intended.)

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

#610

Post by RobertKerans » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #570

criticaljudge wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When your friend Steve comes to you to "borrow" $100 (that he'll never return), because he's short on rent, and he blew last of his cash on hookers and booze, it seems pretty reasonable and perfectly morally justified to either refuse outright, or condition your help on requirement that Steve gets a job, and quits his hookers and booze habit. Certainly, nobody would ever suggest that you have any obligation to enable…

It works because that's not the calculation being made. You're not giving up money specifically to a "Steve" or "Joe". What you are doing is putting money into a pool. From that pool, the money is redistributed in such a way as to provide baseline income to people in need. Most of the people it is redistributed to are not "Steve" or "Joe", and the calculation is that it is cheaper to ignore free riders such as Steve/Joe as they are a small minority. The calculation is also that not providing this baseline is both economically bad (providing a baseline seems to be much more cost effective than dealing with effects of not doing that) and morally bad (most of the people in need of the baseline are in need of it not [directly] through fault of their own)