361–370 of 732 posts
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Poor people also can use a washboard and line dry their clothing. Not as convenient as having machines but just about everyone did it like this till the ‘40s & ‘50s.
Have you ever in your life washed a load of laundry by hand?
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 am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like. Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in t…
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
Descriptively, the author is (worthily!) conveying the real, lived experience of resource scarcity so complete that standard budgeting advice is useless, tone-deaf, etc.
But prescriptively, he goes much further than "useless": advice "doesn't work". The endless runner, The Pit, eternal poverty with "no relief in sight."
This language of inescapability creates a framework where "poor" is effectively defined as "people for whom interventions don't work." This is unfalsifiable! If someone escapes, they were never really "poor".
And if that's true, then what? We can't identify what interventions help, we can't learn from success stories, we can't reason about different causes needing different solutions. The framework meant to defend the poor actually makes it impossible to help them effectively.
The author almost certainly wants to avoid victim-blaming, which is respectable. But defining poverty as this inescapable, almost metaphysical state removes all agency from both people in poverty and those who'd want to help them.
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…
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
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Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre. Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High ec…
Your statement doesn't really make sense and contradicts what research [1] is saying so you really back that up with a good argument and evidence. [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.
[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/202505/wage-compression-drives-n...
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…
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
I do! So does everyone I like.
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I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like. Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in t…
> He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like. Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in t…
> something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford. Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine. Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again. Until I finally got enough ea…
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You can definitely be fat making food from scratch. Making it from scratch doesn't mean it is low calorie. See also: southern home cooking.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here. If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in…
Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.