What really drives the poor

Working hard, despite much propaganda to the contrary, isn't a solution. I'm not even sure what it means in this context. Being poor is very hard work in and of itself, as taking care of the basic necessities of life takes a lot more time and effort when you can't use the expensive short cuts that middle-class people take for granted.

When you're poor, everything takes longer, everything associated with money causes anxiety, the social stigma can prevent you from making useful connections, healthcare becomes more difficult to access, you have to spend time fixing or working around broken items, if you have a job you likely work longer and/or more uncomfortable hours, if you don't have a job there's the added stress and stigma from that, many government programs in reality become traps due to their desire to control poor people's lives, you cannot afford and/or do not have the time or energy left to make healthy food, etc. There are many, many other factors, many of which can be trivially seen to magnify other factors.

Currently I'm in a Ph.D. program in a field I find extremely interesting, and am quite happy with my position relative to my goals and background. A few years ago, however, I was living in a one room apartment above an auto body shop, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with several tenants in various stages of socioeconomic distress (viz. social service dependence, street-level prostitution, drug addiction, &c.). My life was generally unpleasant. I was working as a day labourer in construction and drove my four hour daily commute in perpetual terror of being pulled over while driving on a suspended license (for failing to pay an old ticket that was sent to the wrong address). My "roommates" repeatedly stole my food and occasionally broke into my room to steal loose cash. I had no health insurance. When I bit the bullet and drove myself to the ER after receiving an inguinal hernia on the job (while carrying literal tons of demo debris down three flights of stairs in a Baltimore rowhouse in July), I was stuck with an 800 dollar medical bill that plagues my credit to this day. When my parked car was struck in a drug-related accident (remember I didn't live in the best part of town), the city ran my plates and booted my car, soon after which it was towed and I had to find another job. My life was brimming with problems, the solution to any which required money that I didn't have. Moreover, the concurrence of all of these problems seemed to frustrate action on any one of them: how do I work if I don't have a car? How do I recover and fix my car if I don't have any money? How do I find work if I can't lift heavy objects without aggravating the hernia? How do I treat the hernia without health insurance, which I don't have even if I had a job? I am not relating all of this in order to garner sympathy, but rather to explain the kinds of problems I encountered, and their apparent magnitude relative to my means then.

One aspect of poverty which is probably less salient to those not acquainted with it is that it alters parts of your personality that you previously considered stable. While I had always considered myself a relatively even and temperate guy, friends who saw me then would tell me that I seemed constantly angry and brooding. Things that I could have taken in stride before were usually occasions for despair.

Even my tastes changed. Whereas I had previously considered soda and individually wrapped danishes disgusting, I found I could hardly help myself in 7-11s on my way home from construction sites. I used to enjoy cooking, but could barely manage to throw a can of beans a 25 cent box of mac and artificial cheese when I got home. (I shopped at a discount off-brand grocery store full of security cameras, screaming children and expired fruit.)

There is a famous quote from Orwell's _Road to Wigan Pier_ which I had never understood until that point in my life:

"The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."

This is just about one of the most accurate and robust observations you can make about the psychology of poverty.

So that's why I'm no longer terribly impressed about the exhortations of the rich to "knuckle down and work really hard" in order to bootstrap oneself into economic security and material comfort. My situation wasn't nearly as destitute as that of a lot of people in this country alone, and when I came home from work I wanted--very badly--to blow money I didn't have on cheap comforts and postpone thoughts of tomorrow.

Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that even while living with junkies and hauling debris for $10/hr, I was much better off than many in my situation, for reasons that make me much less impressed with riches to rags to riches stories such as you describe. Let me explain.

When I first began applying for construction jobs, I was objectively under-qualified in comparison to almost any other applicant, of which there were many since construction jobs were becoming scarce around 2008. I remember one interview where I flatly failed the ``technical portion" and had over-estimated my competence to boot, demonstrating that I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was nevertheless hired because I "talked educated" (verbatim quote, I swear to god), which I assume meant either that I was white, or didn't come from the working class backgrounds of south Baltimore of the other applicants. About three months after my first day labor gig (which I only found because I had internet access and at-the-time reliable private transportation), I was running a crew under my boss. I was offered this not because I was an objectively knowledgeable and competent carpenter, but because 1) I had learned serviceable Spanish in an enrichment program as a kid, and 2) the college-educated owner felt that I was "more like him" than the Salvadoran guys who actually knew what they were doing.

I was also able to pull in some lucrative (to me) side gigs tutoring math and Latin in-home (again, internet and car), which ultimately allowed me to get out of construction and start teaching rich kids full time. That obviously would not ever have happened if I were a day labourer from west Baltimore, rather than a middle-class kid from the county who happened to be very down on his luck.

The differences that separated me from the people I met during that period were vast. If I had found myself in those circumstances without the advantages of white skin, middle-class education and secret-handshakes, and freedom from further complications like care-giving responsibilities (as you somehow manage to mention and dismiss the significance of), I'm not sure that things would have turned out the same way. Really, I'm not so sure that things were guaranteed to turn out the way they did for me at all.

And, anyhow, your story is about a single, healthy man, with a very clearly defined plan and an escape valve, not a bunch of trapped mothers trying to raise children.

Just a couple of gems that made me skip it:

""" they may well be more driven by ideas, simply because they have less information about the world outside """

So, supposedly, us, the rich people, live in the "real" world, why them , the poors, live in a world from which they cannot see "outside". Ok, I got it.

""" She would also read to us books on Mother Teresa, on African children, etc """

Mother Teresa and African children in the same sentence, what's this, "feel-good bingo for well-off people"? Also notice the "etc" after "African children", that's a first.

And I could go on and on. In case anyone's curious (and before you start downvotting me), I'm furious about the condescending tone of this article because some time ago, when I was 15-16, my family went from middle-class status to poverty (meaning less per US$ 1 per day per person) in a very short time. I can still remember my mum, an engineer by training, going to the market place early in the morning to sell home-grown parsley. She gave me most of that money in order to pay for private math-lessons given by my high-school math teacher (that was the only way to get into CS school). I still try to help my parents as much as I can, but 10 years later they still rely mostly on subsistence agriculture. But, nevertheless, they're happy with it, that's their life, they have their small piece of land, they garden it, they live under the sun in fresh air and not in a God-forsaken cubicle with artificial lights, and my dad would look very strangely at these "rich", paper-writing people who think he's living in a "different", lesser world.