Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor • Hacker News Board

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#51

Post by cyberlurker » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

azornathogron wrote: post #29

lotsofpulp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your liabilities and other aspects like age. 6,000 EUR per month is $7,300 USD per month is tough if you’re a new pharmacist in the US and need to repay $300k of student loans and make up for 4 to 6 years of lost income and catch up retirement savings, as an example.

I'll grant you the loan repayment, but the other things aren't expenses. "Lost income" is a psychological artefact, not anything concrete. It's a result of comparing against some hypothetical ideal financial situation. The same for "catching up" on retirement savings. The concrete part is that people with that level of income (large, but not so large as to make all problems disappear) know that to be comfortable in t…

Yes, the problems of those with lower income are more immediate and I think it is grossly unfair to blame their predicament on their character or inherent talents.

I disagree that lost income is purely psychological. There are biological realities to deal with, especially in the US without the social safety net of other countries, that make lost income important. The first two that come to mind are the significant cost of raising children and retirement. Those are ticking clock issues to many people.

I agree they are two different worlds for low and middle income people. But we could play this game with even lower income people elsewhere in the world and reduce the issues of the developed countries poor.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#52

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

atatatat wrote: post #33

The financial planning bit is meant to come before one has a list of expenses to "figure out" (like home+leased car+children).

"Just don't have kids" is, IMO, one of the most incredibly insensitive approaches to this problem. It reminds me of all the people telling gay people to "just don't have a relationship". Having an entire class of people who work hard but are too poor to raise children is a failure of society - not a failure of financial planning.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#53

Post by spaetzleesser » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #4

Poor Americans often don't understand what it's like to be poor. Spending extended time in a severely damaged third world country absent all security opens all kinds of perspectives.

That's incredibly condescending. What good can come out of saying this? Should poor people stop worrying about paying their bills because other countries have it worse?

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#54

Post by sidlls » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #4

Poor Americans often don't understand what it's like to be poor. Spending extended time in a severely damaged third world country absent all security opens all kinds of perspectives.

It's fairly hilarious to me when this sentiment comes up.

Gun violence, police brutality, lack of access to food, pest-infested ramshackle housing, lack of access to utilities of every sort (water, power), and poor or little access to education are all things I regularly witnessed or experienced when I was growing up poor in America.

I find generally the people who express what you have simply don't realize how terribly wrong they are.

You know, your comment doesn't really have much to do with the article anyhow. I guarantee you no matter how much "better off" American poors are than some elsewhere, they definitely do not as a rule think those who do have it worse are in their predicament due to their own choices. That is, there's a high degree of overlap, as compared to the relationship between America's poor and its rich/powerful.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#55

Post by dralley » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

aspaviento wrote: post #5

FriedrichN wrote: post #3

A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me. I was really young, but that really stuck with me.

I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. Some people live in a bubble so far from the real world that almost seems fantasy.

I remember when US Reps worth millions were mocking AOC for not being able to simultaneously afford an apartment in DC and NYC prior to receiving her congressional paycheck.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#56

Post by christophilus » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

FriedrichN wrote: post #3

A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me. I was really young, but that really stuck with me.

We had a babysitter recently charge us $21 for 3 hours. It blew my mind. I insisted that we paid her $40, which still seemed insane.

Someone earning $7/hr makes $280/week. I can’t imagine trying to get by on that even with no dependents.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#57

Post by hn8788 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

I had a co-worker who thought he had a typical american childhood because he didn't consider his family wealthy, even though they had millions of dollars of networth over 30 years ago. Him and his 3 bothers went to a very exclusive private school that was 50k a year per child, but since his classmates were mostly "old money" that were from family worth 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, he was picked on for being the "poor" kid, so still thinks of himself as having a middle class family.

He was also the only person I've seen who made me consider that "afluenza" might be a real thing. He would get super bad stomach aches and diarrhea any time he ate fast food because he was mentally conditioned to believe it was disgusting. He even went to the doctor about it, and was told it's all in his head, it's just the thought of eating poor people food made him ill.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#58

Post by wpietri » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

aspaviento wrote: post #5

FriedrichN wrote: post #3

A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me. I was really young, but that really stuck with me.

I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. Some people live in a bubble so far from the real world that almost seems fantasy.

One summer in high school I got a factory job. It was Michigan, so I was running an injection molding press making the rims for side mirrors. (Decades later I still remember that the press took 67 seconds per cycle, and that 1600 rims was the shift target.) I was on second shift, so my crew didn't see the executives much. But one day the CEO held an all-hands, so we shut all the machinery down and went to an area big enough for him to talk with us all.

I no longer remember what the meeting was about, but I think it must have been related to why the company couldn't afford a raise people were expecting. Somebody asked him a question that I couldn't hear; he looked a little flush and responded quickly, off the cuff. This guy who was wearing a nice suit, this guy who had clean hands and no burns from the presses, this guy who was easily clearing 10x what his workers made: this guy said, "I live paycheck to paycheck just like you all do!" And implied that he was just helpless in the face of his wife spending to much. Everybody in the room scoffed at him. I'm still scoffing.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#59

Post by 317070 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #4

Poor Americans often don't understand what it's like to be poor. Spending extended time in a severely damaged third world country absent all security opens all kinds of perspectives.

What I find the more useful comparison, is to compare the poor of a country, to the median income of other countries. That puts the US bottom decile household at $10800 slightly below the median Malaysian, Russian, Ukrainian or Mexican household.

The bottom percent household income is at $1400 in the US, which puts them slightly below the median in Zambia, Burkina Faso and Benin.

Note, these other countries also have poor! And this is a comparison in dollars, not in standard of living. But it gives a broad idea of the level of poverty some people are dealing with.

Re: Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

#60

Post by gonzo41 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #35

elliekelly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would you suggest poor Americans afford the plane ticket necessary to achieve those perspectives? Just because there are people in the world who have it worse doesn’t mean poor Americans should just deal with it.

If poverty were an easily solved problem then it wouldn't be a problem at all and we wouldn't be having this discussion. That is the gap between sympathy versus empathy and differences in economic opportunity versus disadvantages of social pressures/reinforcement.

Poverty is a choice. Its not unsolvable. In Australia we had economic support that was pretty generous during COVID. Poverty pretty much vanished. Then it got expensive, the support ended and it's back. Poverty is a choice.