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Being poor vs. being broke

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#191

Post by Ccecil »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #7

It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache. I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are ju…

It's been posted here before...Vime's boots.

https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#192

Post by eulgro »

I have trouble understanding how someone really can be poor.

I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough.

If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary.

This is possible because we live in an era of abundance. This wasn't possible for most of history.

So to me, being poor, for those without major health issues and with the ability to work full time, is either a skills issue, or a mindset issue.

This guy has a car. I don't think we need to look further than that.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#193

Post by pavel_lishin »

potato3732842 wrote: post #91
lubujackson wrote: post #33

"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…

I know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense. I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.

It also exists where the population is very dense; poor people live in cities, too, and form these kinds of relationships and networks as well.

I'm not poor, but I had more of this sort of network in the city than I do now in the burbs.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#194

Post by carlosjobim »

fullshark wrote: post #38

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…

I guess because the ratio of people complaining about poverty is 10 000 to 1 compared to people who give solutions to poverty.

There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?

I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#195

Post by roxolotl »

dijit wrote: post #125

Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor. The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial…

Yea my partner grew up genuinely poor and it’s interesting seeing how it impacts their mentality. The simplest but clear example is they never finish low-perishable food they like until they have more of it. There is always a few potato chips left in the bag. One cookie left waiting till it’s necessary to get through a rough day or more are purchased. They are the best saver I’ve ever met. But it wasn’t until they got lucky and got a break that it mattered because they never had anything to save but cookies.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#196

Post by hexator »

eulgro wrote: post #192

I have trouble understanding how someone really can be poor. I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough. If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary. This i…

Telling poor people we're living in an era of abundance is not a little bit tone deaf. Also, having a car doesn't make one not poor— A car in America is not a luxury, it's a requirement to have a job in most places.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#197

Post by potato3732842 »

ModernMech wrote: post #182
carlosjobim wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.

> It's nobody's fault Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way. Remember, in this system you get paid mo…

If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now.

The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.

Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#198

Post by antisthenes »

mehulashah wrote: post #92

He right. I’ve seen poverty in India, but I misunderstood it. There was a 12 year old kid who guided our boat down the Narmada after we spread my Dads ashes. He was not in school because he wanted money. I told him I’d pay him double and continue to pay him for his days work, if he’d go back to school during the day and only row boats at night. He said no. Just give me what you owe me. He had no hope that education i…

> He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him.

I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.

Everything else was self-taught/learned.

There's an enormous disconnect in educational systems between what skills will get people out of poverty, what skills are great for wealthy navel-gazing students and what skills some bureaucrat decided "everyone" should have (but no one does, because no one pays attention in those classes).

And when people lose faith in the public educational system is when you get dysfunctional societies for the majority of your citizens.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#199

Post by _vaporwave_ »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #7

It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache. I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are ju…

This is basically the "Boots theory":

> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#200

Post by mayoff »

monero-xmr wrote: post #138
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’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do). No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me

Some people suffer and think "I had to go through this and I hope no one else does."

Some people suffer and think "I had to go through this so everyone else should too."

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