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Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

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Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#361

Post by bradleyjg »

webmaven wrote: post #353
mschuster91 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will watch the market fall The market won't fall, that is the entire point. It reasonably cannot fall, since the only politics that could make it fall (buildout of rural infrastructure, overriding NIMBY shit) won't ever pass. Inertia is massive.

> > They will watch the market fall > The market won't fall, that is the entire point. It reasonably cannot fall, since the only politics that could make it fall (buildout of rural infrastructure, overriding NIMBY shit) won't ever pass. Inertia is massive. That's probably overoptimistic. There are political circumstances that could cause metropolitan property values to fall on annual or even decadal timescales. Consi…

Suppose house prices fall by twenty percent. People will be furious that their can’t lose investment is losing. People in this case being an outright majority of all adult citizens and disproportionately likely to be voters. Politicians will do everything in their power to reverse the trend and keep the good times going. Someday they may find it impossible, but I find it hard to believe we are close to that.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#362

Post by 8note »

proc0 wrote: post #208

Poor people in the U.S. are not really poor. This is the irony in the article and a lot of comments I see. You are acting out the same headline, but in perspective of real poverty. Did you grow up in a town with dirt roads? Did your neighbors live in cardboard and aluminum self-made housing? Did your family struggle to eat and everyone around you is so skinny that fat people are a rare sight? These are some markers o…

There are plenty of people around Seattle that are living in cardboard and aluminum self made housing.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#363

Post by bradleyjg »

imtringued wrote: post #322
bradleyjg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, but also the entire GSEs edifice, the Fed’s MBS purchases, and lots more.

Overpriced houses make construction arbitrage easier. It's easier to build a new house than to buy an existing one.

The places I’ve lived all my life have few or no empty lots. To build a new house you need to buy and tear down an existing one.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#364

Post by christiansakai »

nanis wrote: post #36

Wealth is a stock measure, income is flow. You accumulate wealth out of what you can set aside out of the flow. Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation. Then, when we sort of "make it" here, people who…

This so much. Pretty much why I can never ever mingle peacefully with most of my US born friends. They are too woke for me.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#365

Post by proc0 »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #344
proc0 wrote: post #208

Poor people in the U.S. are not really poor. This is the irony in the article and a lot of comments I see. You are acting out the same headline, but in perspective of real poverty. Did you grow up in a town with dirt roads? Did your neighbors live in cardboard and aluminum self-made housing? Did your family struggle to eat and everyone around you is so skinny that fat people are a rare sight? These are some markers o…

There are actually many, many communities in the United States where people live on dirt roads. That's super common. I grew up on a dirt road, and my parents still live on one. Much of the rural US lives off of paved roads. With food and stuff, the thing is that in the US, you can very quickly go from having not much to having nothing. Many people do suffer from hunger and live on the edge because the cost of living…

> The correlate to the people you are describing in the United States are referred to as the 'homeless.'

It really isn't, and I'm assuming you have never been to Brasil, Bolivia, Peru (Venezuela is out of the question for travelers, but also another example), not to mention Central America and parts of Mexico, I'm sure.

We're talking about inter-generational poverty. People having absolutely no knowledge of what it's like to live a normal life. Poverty that takes you back in time. Some of these places don't have running water or electricity (in fact, no electricity isn't even a big deal in these areas, people are used to it).

Also the dirt roads I mention isn't some rural countryside. I'm talking about poor towns and cities, that have no resources to pave the roads. I still remember TV ads with politicians constantly promising to pave those heavily used roads, but of course it's rampant with corruption.

I think anyone who has not travelled outside of a developed nation, like the US or the UK, probably cannot imagine what people in poor countries consider their every day reality. The contrast is stark, and I'll repeat as many times as necessary, poor people in the US are not really poor. I guess some of them just take their developed nation for granted.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#366

Post by gruez »

baq wrote: post #318
gruez wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the right characterization to me? Definition from wiktionary: >3. (transitive) To provide an excuse for; to explain, with the aim of alleviating guilt or negative judgement . Earlier in the thread there was definitely a tone of negative judgement. ie. "people show up all the time with a litany of complaints and a litany of awful, awful budget mistakes they have no interest in fixing"

Negative judgment is exactly what is off mark. Real humans make mistakes. No whys or buts or excepts. They just do and they shouldn't be blamed for what is essentially being human. IOW people can't be reasonably expected to make rational, self-interested choices. (It's actually amazing this is almost a Nobel-prize worthy observation in economics. This is psychology 101.) If you ask why or what kinds of mistakes they…

>Negative judgment is exactly what is off mark.

Right, but I'm not the person giving the negative judgement. I specifically recognize the possibility of "excusing" them (ie. not negatively judging them) in some cases, and ask whether they should be excused in some cases or all cases. After this long conversation it appears you believe in the latter. Is this correct?

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#367

Post by proc0 »

8note wrote: post #362
proc0 wrote: post #208

Poor people in the U.S. are not really poor. This is the irony in the article and a lot of comments I see. You are acting out the same headline, but in perspective of real poverty. Did you grow up in a town with dirt roads? Did your neighbors live in cardboard and aluminum self-made housing? Did your family struggle to eat and everyone around you is so skinny that fat people are a rare sight? These are some markers o…

There are plenty of people around Seattle that are living in cardboard and aluminum self made housing.

And were they born into it? Maybe now Seattle will catch up to Latin America, but I was talking about poverty that spans across generations. People who don't even know it's possible to have a different life, and therefore when you meet them they're not in a bad mood, they accept their reality and live their life as if that's all there is, except so many places still lack basic needs like running water and electricity.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all in the U.S., but there's no comparison. Even the worse parts of the developed world still have access to many resources that some people in poor countries will never have access to in their lifetimes.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#368

Post by webmaven »

allenrb wrote: post #136

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on a ladder in a basement, doing a bit of plumbing. And I thought, “Isn’t this odd? Here I am, rather well-off, cleaning out the drain for an elderly black gentleman.” And it was more satisfying than most of what I’ve done at a keyboard. To elaborate, for quite a few years I’ve owned rental property in poor-to-working class parts of town, first houses and then apartments. If you’…

> [I]t makes me wonder how bad things are with other landlords.

Pretty darn bad. One landlord I had was constantly playing musical chairs with appliances (stoves, refrigerators, air-conditioners) that were replaced with ones that never stayed working for very long before having to be swapped out and repaired (shoddily) again.

Another got rid of tenants at the end of their lease (never longer than a year) no matter what in order to raise rents to whatever (they thought) the market would bear. They preferred having half of their units empty over not raising rates.

Another considered anyone complaining about another tenant or being complained about to be a 'problem' necessitating removal ASAP, and forget about your security deposit.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#369

Post by warkdarrior »

mindslight wrote: post #229
duped wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their dual mandate is to maximize employment and manage inflation. Their mission is exactly not to create inflation (or at least, too much of it).

"Manage" inflation means to create it. An economy naturally tends towards price deflation, through optimization and technological progress. Business looking for ways to cut costs to compete is intrinsic to a market.

Maybe a competitive economy tends towards deflation. In economies dominated by monopolies/oligopolies, price deflation is not a given.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#370

Post by 9dev »

voidfunc wrote: post #108

Oh man this resonates in a weird way... I don't know jack shit about being poor. I grew up extremely well-off in the late 80s and 90s. My college education was paid 100% by my parents without a loan. We had nice cars and belonged to country clubs. Even in my first job where I was only making 35K/yr my parents gave me quite a bit of help so it was easy. I have a few friends that are poor... I feel for their issues, I…

If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your perspective on your purpose in life? I always wondered if the outlook is different for someone starting from Boardwalk instead of Baltic Avenue, so to speak.
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