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Being poor vs. being broke

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#101

Post by kgwgk »

umvi wrote: post #36

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…

> The high(er) paying jobs

What about low paying jobs? I’m sure some people on minimum wage have netflix - which automatically makes them non-poor according to TFA.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#102

Post by abbablack »

moralestapia wrote: post #47
merth wrote: post #12

I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.

This argument is baseless. All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!). "But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning l…

Your argument holds even less ground. Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help. Instead say woe and stay in the same bucket and beg for handouts since there's no 12k in safeguards. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck due to your own spending habits it's a personal issue as well. As someone previously commented, it's about reducing expenses while making money. It isn't going to immediately lift you out. But it will eventually.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#103

Post by JohnMakin »

barbazoo wrote: post #90
hexator wrote: post #37

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.

> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 dec…

I’d say a large percentage of americans do. It’s burned into the cultural mindset at a very young age.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#104

Post by [deleted] »

barbazoo wrote: post #99
qwertox wrote: post #84

> You can’t afford to go to the movies, but will stay home and watch what’s new on Netflix. I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.

If you're a family it's much cheaper to have Netflix, spread these $20 over 4 people a month than going to the movie theater for $100+ every time. These $20/month are already out of reach for many, I realize that.

[deleted]

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#105

Post by cowpig »

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…

Things that are pretty much out of those peoples' control can include health problems, dependents such as kids or needy older relatives, accidents, a long tail of other kinds of bad luck (fires, victim of fraud, etc)

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#106

Post by potato3732842 »

baq wrote: post #86
reaperducer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sit…

> Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.

Legality only matters insofar as people use it as a mental shortcut to turn off their brains.

Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#108

Post by wslh »

Sorry, but poverty is also a spectrum. Many people who have never been poor cannot understand that, but even if you have been poor, you still cannot fully understand someone else’s poverty.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#109

Post by dotnet00 »

lucianbr wrote: post #82
reaperducer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sit…

Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.

It's to have something better than just the bare minimum. I remember seeing similar reports about higher education in remote villages in India, with cellular networks and internet access allowing people to learn without being able to move to somewhere close to sufficiently qualified teachers.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#110

Post by blizdiddy »

webdood90 wrote: post #89
blizdiddy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 am answering this question. Perhaps you could reply with something useful instead of attacking my comment.

You should feel embarrassed for “thinking” so callously and uncritically. Do you need everything handed to you? Family issues, natural disasters, medical events, house fires, abuse, wage theft, fate. I’ve worked with the destitute, there is no safety net.
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