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Being poor vs. being broke

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#201

Post by Den_VR »

jibe wrote: post #185
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…

This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like. https://cds.bie.edu/ Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.

I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#202

Post by rfrey »

cowpig wrote: post #112
sgarland wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism. Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.” 0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-... 1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-departme…

[flagged]

One half-hour later the post is unflagged and not greyed at all.

There are many unflagged, un-downvoted posts on this forum that criticize Trump, my own included.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#203

Post by bradlys »

The semantics here really suck.

I grew up lower middle class because for most of my life my parents both had full-time jobs. (By the definition, you are not "poor" in the US if you have a full-time job) However, we grew up what I would call educationally poor. My parents struggled with financial woes constantly. In my mind, we were broke due to their ineptness but they were poor as far as this writer is concerned. That said, I grew up around much more poverty than most in the US can imagine. I went to (public) school four days a week because the local district couldn't afford the fifth day. My parents had no thoughts about college or me getting ahead. There was no planning for my future. I had to entirely self-drive everything. There's obviously a lot more dark parts of this that come with being educationally poor as well but no need to elaborate.

Anyway, my point about all that is that I think it's really a mindset more than anything else. I don't think everyone can do what I did but I came from such a bad background with no hope at all and I still managed to be early eng for an IPO, FAANG, competitive university, etc.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#204

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

rsyring wrote: post #73
philipwhiuk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was unconvinced he was writing about his current state, but a prior state / maybe his family background.

I hadn't considered that until reading comments like this. It's possible...probable even. In that case, was he really poor? His whole argument is that being poor is a permanent state. If he's not poor now, was he ever?

His comment that you can get out- two people did- may either be a claim that his own escape doesn’t prove that escape is possible for all, or a batman reference. I lack the media literacy to be sure which.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#205

Post by jandrewrogers »

Most Americans don't understand real poverty. It exists outside their reality. They've never seen it, let alone experienced it.

To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.

It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.

You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#206

Post by dugidugout »

tome wrote: post #45
cluckindan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”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.”

So is it your belief that the author currently considers himself poor? (FWIW, I don't think he does.)

Why is anyone assuming this? It was the GP of this chain who was providing this assumption. The OP was commenting on the condition of being poor and the meaningful difference between the commonly experienced condition of being "broke". This entire digression is likely a reflection of what motivated OP to put this post together.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#207

Post by rapfaria »

I worked at a media company that used to track time the users spent watching TV, so they could charge advertisers accordingly. "Hundred million watched the Super Bowl", things like that.

The way they measured that was by having devices installed on peoples homes, that tracked TV usage, and all of it was planned around demographics as well. People would get a few bucks for having the device installed. But hey, if you wanted to measure the top 1% of income, what would you do? A few bucks meanth nothing, so it was always in terms of 'favors' and 'gifts'. A nice champagne here and there.

What about the bottom 5, 10%? Well, you can't give them any money, because that could effectively move them from one social class to another (not the US, but locally this would be moving them from Class E to Class D). So you took them to lunch.

I thought it was wild once I learned that.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#208

Post by nightpool »

jibe wrote: post #185
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…

This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like. https://cds.bie.edu/ Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.

The story that photograph is from is about distance learning enforced by the COVID pandemic. https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom.... The family does not have internet access, and while they were issued a laptop and mobile hotspot, it only gets signal from the top of that hill.

OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#210

Post by moralestapia »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #136
moralestapia wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being able to save money for an emergency fund is the first step towards financial and life stability if you're poor. So, yes, cutting out extraneous expenditures does add up, even if it doesn't directly make you move up the socioeconomic ladder. Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired…

Just curious. What is your experience with poverty in your own life?
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