What really drives the poor • Hacker News Board

Re: What really drives the poor

#41

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:13 PM UTC

repos wrote: post #15

wccrawford wrote: post #6

They finally hit on the real story halfway down: "“Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor,” they write in their new book." Yes, the poor spend their money unwisely when they have extra. That's the real reason. If a rich person finds themselves down on their luck, they knuckle down and work really hard to get into a situation where they can afford to buy luxuries. It…

"In other words, he spent his money wisely and was able to vastly improve his lifestyle in less than a year." He also had the privilege of a good education and good upbringing. You are making way too many assumptions to think that all it takes is wisdom and good decisions. What we can think and do is strongly shaped by our environment, and getting yourself out of poverty is harder than you think.

One year is nothing. From experience I'd say that being poor is not hard for a year. It's the 3rd, 4th, 7th year, ... when your clothes all have holes that you've no energy to repair, your home starts to fall in to disrepair, you've been wearing leaky shoes for over a year, there appears to be no hope of ending your situation ...

Re: What really drives the poor

#42

Post by Unseelie » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:17 PM UTC

burgerbrain wrote: post #23

dodo53 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's quite funny. If he really was poor, that unexpected family member becoming ill would probably have knocked him back financially / meant he had to take time off work to care for them whatever.

Sudden unforseen and expensive illness in the family isn't really all that common though. Furthermore, it is only really a problem in countries such as the US which don't have affordable healthcare for the poor. There certainly are many people in this world that are poor because of a series of very unfortunate incidences that put them at a disadvantage. However, I think it's pretty clear that despite how common that…

No, sudden unforeseen and expensive illnesses aren't that common. Sudden costs are. Costs don't even need to be unforseen, they just have to be more than you can deal with on a timescale.

Re: What really drives the poor

#43

Post by wvoq » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #39

wvoq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. I'd like to see if I can offer you some personal insight about the plausibility of extrapolating evidence from the scenarios you describe into broader policy judgments. 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 ki…

Out of interest, what are you doing a Ph.D. in?

Computational biology. I had studied math and philosophy as an undergrad (after I finally got my stuff together) and had become interested in mathematical approaches to biological problems.

Re: What really drives the poor

#44

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:25 PM UTC

Unseelie wrote: post #42

burgerbrain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sudden unforseen and expensive illness in the family isn't really all that common though. Furthermore, it is only really a problem in countries such as the US which don't have affordable healthcare for the poor. There certainly are many people in this world that are poor because of a series of very unfortunate incidences that put them at a disadvantage. However, I think it's pretty clear that despite how common that…

No, sudden unforeseen and expensive illnesses aren't that common. Sudden costs are. Costs don't even need to be unforseen, they just have to be more than you can deal with on a timescale.

[deleted]

Re: What really drives the poor

#45

Post by mapgrep » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:28 PM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #29

wccrawford wrote: post #6

They finally hit on the real story halfway down: "“Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor,” they write in their new book." Yes, the poor spend their money unwisely when they have extra. That's the real reason. If a rich person finds themselves down on their luck, they knuckle down and work really hard to get into a situation where they can afford to buy luxuries. It…

At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill. Wait, what was this? He got faced with a situation he couldn't handle with wise decision-making, saving, and elbow grease and had to tap into his riches to get himself out? You know, the real problem is that he got a nice apartment and car. If he lived in a shack and walked everywhere, I bet he'd have been able to help his family member out. Was he…

This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wealth among the poor.

Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...)

So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut.

It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.

Re: What really drives the poor

#46

Post by felipemnoa » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:38 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #38

I barely made it half-way through the article, it sounded like an United Colors of Benetton add adapted into a Nobel-winning Economics paper. 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 cann…

"that was the only way to get into CS school"

Couldn't you just have gone into a community college and move on from there. It is a lot cheaper and lot of the professors are actually pretty good. If your grades are good you should be able to transfer into a decent 4 year college.

Re: What really drives the poor

#47

Post by varjag » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:43 PM UTC

temphn wrote: post #24

chromatic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is Andrew Carnegie. Perhaps other mechanisms to reduce poverty will be more effective.

Capitalism reduced the poverty of Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Chile, and Estonia (to name a few). What country was built from foreign aid?

Estonia wasn't really poverty-stricken.

Re: What really drives the poor

#48

Post by daniel-cussen » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:49 PM UTC

wvoq wrote: post #34

wccrawford wrote: post #6

They finally hit on the real story halfway down: "“Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor,” they write in their new book." Yes, the poor spend their money unwisely when they have extra. That's the real reason. If a rich person finds themselves down on their luck, they knuckle down and work really hard to get into a situation where they can afford to buy luxuries. It…

Hi. I'd like to see if I can offer you some personal insight about the plausibility of extrapolating evidence from the scenarios you describe into broader policy judgments. 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 ki…

>"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."

So, calories, or not enough of them. Cooked food has more net calories than uncooked food. It's probably the same reason that, nowadays, poor people like to watch TV: it shuts your brain (20-30% of your metabolism) down harder than falling asleep. It's a decision that doesn't make any sense until you think of it calorically.

Re: What really drives the poor

#49

Post by chrismealy » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:50 PM UTC

Mike Konczal:

Here’s the normal story. Picture you are in a room with 10 people. Each of them has a slice of cake. How much you are willing to pay for a slice of the cake is the ‘marginal utility’ of having it, and the more cake you have the less any more cake is worth to you. You’d be willing to pay a $1 for the first slice of cake, but you’d only be will to pay 90 cents for the second slice. You’d only be willing to pay 10 cents for the 9th slice, and a penny for the 10th slice. Eating the 10th slice of cake in that room would probably make you sick, hence you want it a lot less than the first slice, which is delicious. That’s declining marginal utility.

Now picture you are in a room with 10 people screaming. You hate it when people scream, and you can pay a person to get them to stop screaming. Would you pay in a similar way to the cake example? Would you pay a $1 to get the first person to stop screaming, and a penny for the 10th person to stop screaming?

No. Getting one person to stop screaming would make very little difference in how much you dislike being in the room. Modern psychology tells us you might not even notice it. You’d probably only pay a penny to get that first guy to stop screaming. However getting the second guy to stop screaming might be worth 10 cents. And the last guy, the difference between some screaming and no screaming, might be worth the full dollar to you. The more quiet it got, the more a marginal difference in how quiet it is would be worth to you. There’s increasing returns to this good; the 10th guy not screaming is worth more than the first guy not screaming, which is the exact opposite dynamic of the 10th cake being less delicious than the first.

-- http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/persistence-of-pov...

Re: What really drives the poor

#50

Post by skue » Sat, Jun 25, 2011, 10:52 PM UTC

temphn wrote: post #20

wccrawford wrote: post #6

They finally hit on the real story halfway down: "“Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor,” they write in their new book." Yes, the poor spend their money unwisely when they have extra. That's the real reason. If a rich person finds themselves down on their luck, they knuckle down and work really hard to get into a situation where they can afford to buy luxuries. It…

It is really as simple as noting the robust heritability of cognitive traits (see "The Blank Slate") and the strong correlation between intelligence, conscientiousness, and wealth. But surprisingly, many highly intelligent people (including many in this very thread) will actually deny that they have any natural cognitive advantages over the poor. They will readily admit they are smarter than those "idiots" who can't…

No.

This isn't a question of intelligence. It's a question of how people with different levels of wealth/status have different priorities. I've experienced it in periods of my own life, depending on how financially secure I've felt - and so far as I can tell, my intelligence hasn't changed. Abraham Maslow discussed the psychology behind this half a century ago. (1)

Of course there are many other issues affecting the poor, which this article doesn't address and which you completely ignore. The fact is that it's simply more expensive to be poor. Not having a car can mean you might have to sacrifice an entire day of work just to take your child to the doctor by bus (and this isn't an abstract hypothetical - I've treated these families). When you don't have extra money you sacrifice income to late fees, pay higher interest rates, are unable to benefit for long-term or bulk discounts. And don't even get me started on predatory services like check cashing or rent to own companies.

Bottom line, it's cheap to be rich, and expensive to be poor. And when every day is a struggle you see the world differently than a high paid yuppy with a secure tech job in an otherwise miserable economy (that's not a personal jab, I put myself in this category as well).

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs