The Unexotic Underclass • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#151

Post by happyscrappy » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:08 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #150

wolfgke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine them needing to spend money on food, accepted > education, There is so much educational stuff available on the internet and public libraries that I can't see a reason why there is a lot money to spend on. > housing Accepted > and entertainment. May I tell you something: As a graduate student I have so much work to do that I hardly have any time for entertainment. Thus rather little money is spent on it. C…

Entertainment in the form of television is cheap and widely available. Somehow people still like to argue that the poor should sell their televisions and stare at the wall. Children also have a pretty constant demand for entertainment.

PBS alone is reason enough not to sell your TV.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#152

Post by jazzyk » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:09 PM UTC

jamesash wrote: post #133

x0x0 wrote: post #5

fta: But there’s only so much Washington can do to help out, what with government penniless and gridlocked, and its elected officials occupying a caste of selfishness, cowardice and spite, heretofore unseen in American politics. This is pure both-sides-do-it bullshit. In reality, one side recently passed an amazing transformation of health care to attempt to pull the united states -- still the world's richest large c…

>Somehow Europe, Canada, Japan, etc, all make health care work but we can't. The countries you mentioned largely have outsourced their national defence concerns to the United States, allowing them to have defence budgets of <10% of spending while the USA's defence spending stands at 17% of spending. That is not irrelevant to this discussion.

What does national defense cost have to do with it?

France, ranked consistently as one of the countries with the best health-care, spends 12% vs the US (ranked waaay lower) spending 18%. Several other countries have even better quality-to-cost ratios (Japan, etc)

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#153

Post by bettyx1138 » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:10 PM UTC

the problem is that fixing problems to make the world a better place is not profitable to investors in our system. our system needs fixing.

the important problems won't be solved by products coming out of tech start ups but by service design applied to our dysfunctional social and political systems. imho.

i'd love to ponder and write more about how SD can fix things but i am late for my job designing apps for the privileged class. :-\

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#154

Post by fennecfoxen » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #132

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is - sadly - a hierarchy of insight which privileges self, then family (sometimes), then friends, then associates and coworkers (more or less), then local community, then country, then other countries, then species, then planet and ecosystem. The basic problem is that economics rewards smart choices for the earlier items on the list and punishes smart choices for the later ones. So it's 'not efficient' to think…

> a hierarchy of insight Absolutely, there's a joke on journalism that newsworthiness = death / distance. Evolutionarily that makes a lot of sense, for immediate selfish reasons it makes sense to pay attention to that which directly impacts you. The tragedy here is that we're not really very moral creatures. Somehow when we see a child drowning in a nearby pond, we jump in, despite ruining our smartphone, expensive w…

> But when we are presented with data that $60 can save a child from a painful death through the purchase of Malaria nets, we say no. We come up with many reasons.

One very good reason involved that you didn't mention is that action at a distance like this has significant drawbacks. Since you mention mosquito nets specifically: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/02/opinion/la-oe-shah-2... "In Africa, anti-malaria mosquito nets go unused by recipients".

There are several classes of problem you completely bypass when you're dealing with a drowning child a few tens of meters away. You can anticipate and reason about outcomes in a very tight feedback loop. You don't need to worry about intermediaries, the inscrutability of your impact or about the inherently different risk profiles of immediate interventions versus those that require significant ongoing commitments (to say nothing of corruption or fraud).

To put it in less-human and more-economic terms, the market for immediate interventions better meets the preconditions for efficiency. If you'd like to make remote intervention more common, perhaps you could do something to reduce the costs associated with the transactions involved, including non-financial costs associated with the opacity of the process. Many charities are already researching new structures and applying lessons learned from various trends elsewhere, like crowdfunding.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#155

Post by gphil » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

This has been alluded to in other comments, but without any data. The "unexotic underclass" has virtually no money to spend compared to the upper classes. The bottom 40% in the US has only 0.2% of the wealth!

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#mediavi...

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#156

Post by rayiner » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:16 PM UTC

I like the cut of the author's jib.

One of the things I think is under appreciated is that it's not like the poor don't have money. They do, they just can't afford to waste it on $15 a pop food delivery. But at the same time, it's hard for poor people to spend money efficiently. The yuppie who shops at Costco is getting a better price on food than someone who lives in an urban food desert. Is there a technical solution to these inefficiencies? I bet there is.

I think the biggest, most fundamental problems facing at least the urban poor is the breakdown in social structures in these communities. And social networking technology could help here. There just needs to be a focus shift from helping teenagers sext each other and get laid to helping their parents make sure they're not cutting class.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#157

Post by facepalm » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:25 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #130

facepalm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, many landlords prefer tenants who are on welfare. The state pays their rent, so it's practically guaranteed. So I think single mothers might be a lucrative market. Especially if you can get the foot into the door for some government contract. Another data point: I think Warren Buffet got rich with Coca Cola and chocolate bars? That's basically selling crap to the poor.

> Where I live, many landlords prefer tenants who are on welfare. The state pays their rent, so it's practically guaranteed. So I think single mothers might be a lucrative market. Doesn't this have a side effect of locking those single mothers into poverty? A place to stay offers stabilization, but that alone doesn't help if trying to find a job means losing benefits and not being able to afford a cheap flat, because…

Not just single mothers, everybody who is on welfare. I suppose it is always tricky to set up such a system with minimal side effects. I'm not saying the system is good, but it exists.

There were cases here (Germany) where people had to leave their flat for one with higher rent, because the old flat was too big (welfare recipients being entitled only to so much space). But that was the government forcing them to move, not the landlords.

Not sure if the other thing would happen, landlords throwing out tenants when they don't receive welfare anymore. There are laws to protect tenants once they are in the house, too.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#158

Post by jrochkind1 » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:26 PM UTC

corford wrote: post #142

jrochkind1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are rough on the author -- the author doesn't know they're complaining that the underclass is unexploitable -- they actually believe that 'entrepeneurs' can help the 'underclass' by selling them the right products, if only they'd try harder. The author diagnoses the disease, but their prescription, 'innovating' new things to sell to the underclass (whether in the first or third world) -- will never cure i…

Don't normally do "pedant" posts but this is the second time I've seen it in this thread. The author is a she not a he :)

thank you! Will correct in my post with gender neutral wording, which I should have used from the start.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#159

Post by JabavuAdams » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:26 PM UTC

rwallace wrote: post #85

tinco wrote: post #76

I would really love to cater to the unexotic underclass, but how? I mean he goes on and on about how much opportunity there is, but I don't see it. I know how to get 500 white liberal suburbanite young males to pay me $10 per month. They have the money and they love to spend it on tech and gadgetry that makes their lives even more comfortable. But single house mothers? Poor Romanians? How would I even get them to pay…

Fair point. Maybe the answer is, instead of trying to sell something to the poor, look for a way to enable the poor to sell a service to the rich? I mean, two of the biggest success stories in the recent startup scene are Airbnb and Uber. What do they do? Provide a way for people who don't have much money but do have a useful asset (a spare room, a car, respectively) to make a bit of extra cash selling a service to t…

Organ donation 2.0 and prostitution 2.0.

But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#160

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 2:27 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #114

vinceguidry wrote: post #36

I'm not really understanding the author's position. He seems to think the point of business is to solve problems rather than turn a profit. There are no end of problems to solve in the world, but only a very few of them are profitably solved. You can't keep going without profit. If you want to solve a social problem, you need the tools of social policy, which can bring enough resources to bear that you can afford to…

I'm impressed by the number of commenters who didn't realise the author is a woman. >There are no end of problems to solve in the world, but only a very few of them are profitably solved. They're (not) profitably solved because the economic and political systems have been designed to make them unprofitable. The basic problem is a feedback system which rewards certain activities as 'profitable' and punishes others as…

> They're (not) profitably solved because the economic and political systems have been designed to make them unprofitable.

Not so, and even if it were, that would only further underscore the fact that you still can't solve them with capitalism. The author is effectively recommending that the local high school football team get out there and fix homelessness in the city. The best you can hope for is that they'll provide a nice photo op for the mayor.

> The basic problem is a feedback system which rewards certain activities as 'profitable' and punishes others as 'unprofitable'.

Could you go into detail? Because to me that "feedback system" just seems to be the market. You can't tell people what to want or what to like. That's the basic reason why we have markets.

You might be able to influence the system in small ways through social policy, but again, you can't dictate to people what they should want or not want, because they won't listen to you. The best you can hope for is something like the Fed. You manipulate the levers you have, not the levers you wish you had.

What the author should have done was offer up some ways for Silicon Valley to solve big social problems in profitable ways. Since they don't exist or are really hard to find, otherwise someone else would have gotten rich already solving them, all she can do is moralize.