Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Being poor vs. being broke

blog.ctms.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 732 posts

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#31

Post by renewiltord »

lbrito wrote: post #21

The geographic variation on the semantics of poverty always amaze me. Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view. Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is…

On Reddit, I once saw someone saying something like “You never hear about the Chinese having to live out of their cars.” with respect to a pro-communist take. Forgetting the politics, it really brought home to me how mind-blowingly wealthy Americans are. The poor man this guy conceives of has a motor vehicle.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#33

Post by lubujackson »

"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.

There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#34

Post by cluckindan »

tome wrote: post #27
cluckindan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why did you present fallacious arguments which were already discussed over several paragraphs?

Perhaps you could elaborate, because I read the article and the About page too, and I don't understand what you're getting at.

”It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category: - auto mechanic - digital tech - landscaping”

cf.

”The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#35

Post by nathias »

smithkl42 wrote: post #13

The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in th…

think of this way, the less capital you have the more you depend on luck

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#36

Post by umvi »

It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining.

Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?

Probably pretty quickly:

- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)

- Get a new programming job

- Build a small nest egg

- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame

Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario

- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)

- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)

- Can't build a nest egg easily

Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#37

Post by hexator »

Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#38

Post by fullshark »

It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.

The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#39

Post by doubled112 »

smithkl42 wrote: post #13

The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in th…

> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?

I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#40

Post by reaperducer »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #15

I like this guy’s backstory[0]. I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development. There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, to…

There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.

Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.

There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.

I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.

No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.

Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)

Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.

I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.

These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.

Post reply on HN